Search Results for: visitors,-the

What looked like a big black box – perhaps fifty feet high, two hundred long – had settled squarely on Jerry Conklin’s car. The townspeople of Lone Pine, Minnesota, were the first to see it – and one of them was the first and only human to shoot at it. He paid for his rashness with instant death.
Within hours the public knew something strange had happened and was beginning to face the incredible possibility that the Earth harboured something from outer space. A machine? An intelligent being? There was no way to know. But Jerry Conklin knew. The Visitor had scooped him up, held him prisoner for several hours, then let him go. Jerry knew the Visitor was a living intelligent creature!

A blackmailer – murdered. And the suspect in fear for her life…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Margaret Ross knew she had to pay off the blackmailer, Samson, or else her beloved son would go to jail for forgery.

The next night she rang the bell at Samson’s sinister house on Margate Street. There was no answer. Slowly she entered the house and went up the stairs. Samson was waiting at his desk – murdered. She found the incriminating letters and the cheque and escaped with them. But she had been seen.

The dangers gather like wasps around Margaret and it takes all of Detective Arthur Crook’s genius to get to her in time.

‘Amusing and zestful, with an unexpected and exciting climax’ Daily Telegraph

Sheri Tepper, one of the foremost science fiction writers in the world, gives us an exciting, evocative and thought-provoking tale where science and magic meet head-on. A group of colonists, waking every few hundred years to see what’s been happening on the planet they fled to from a dying Earth, watch as the systems and rules they set in place so long ago become debased and decayed.

The corrupt leaders govern by oppression, but technological resources run low and the knowledge of how to replace them is lost in the mists of time. Instead, the power-hungry leaders turn to sorcery of the blackest kind, kindled by pain and despair.

And when they launch a religious crusade to wipe out all those who won’t conform to the government’s ever-more-stringent dictates, not even the original colonists – the new gods – are safe from the ravaging sorcery-fuelled armies of the righteous . . .

John Deacon uses hypnosis to research altered states of consciousness. One of his subjects, Michael Peacocke, is unusually susceptible and in their first session together he recalls a Close Encounter which took place some years before. Deacon is sceptical of UFOs and dismisses Peacocke’s story as an adolescent sexual fantasy. But then inexplicable things happen – the tape of the session is mysteriously erased, Deacon’s dog is killed, he and Michael see a pterodactyl, Michael’s girlfriend is menaced by Men in Black – and Deacon is forced to reconsider. Could UFOs be symbols projected from the collective unconscious? Are they messages from the biomatrix? Does the mind have the ability to project tulpas, objects and people which are physically real yet somehow illusory?

It is sometime I the near future. The nations of Earth have drawn closer together – there is even hope of a new era of co-operation and progress will soon begin.

These dreams of lasting peace are shattered by one momentous discovery. One of the members of an international team of scientists stationed on the moon has found an alien spacecraft – with all its incredible technology and weaponry intact. The discovery shatters the illusion of peace on Earth, as each nation joins the mad scramble to learn the terrible secrets entombed by alien visitors eons before.

Only one thing prevents total war – Werner Brecht, the discoverer of the vehicle, is the only one who knows its location, and he has disappeared into thin air.

He was ‘The Visitor’ . . .
in a society revolutionised and troubled by a transportation device that let you walk through a door and be anywhere in the world – instantly.

He was ‘The Visitor’ . . .
at a time when unauthorised travel had caused the violent deaths of countless millions and the survivors were quaking in fear.

He was ‘The Visitor’ . . .
in a world where the invasion of privacy was the ultimate crime and where his obsession with visiting places where he had no right to be led him on a perilous adventure towards his own destruction.

The fourth landing of the Daedalus Mission confronts Alex and his companions with a colonial culture seemingly modeled on a classic Utopian dream, but all of its inhabitants are infected with a mysterious alien parasite, and they no longer seem entirely human. Are they being controlled by the parasite, or has the parasite merely enabled them to transform themselves? Can the visitors from Earth avoid infection themselves, and what will the consequences be if they cannot? For once, the risks of the contact seem potentially far greater than any possible reward – but that still leaves the visitors with the necessity of passing judgment and deciding what to do, in an exceedingly awkward situation.

The radar-complex had picked up the strange object in space just as it neared the earth’s surface. It was described as “an object of considerable size.” The impact of its landing at Boulder Lake Park, Colorado, was felt on every seismograph in the world. Then the first reports began to trickle in: there were “creatures” on board? Creatures who soon left their ship and began exploring the area …

Where was the ship from, and what was the quest of the strange visitors? These visitors who were armed with a terrifying paralysis ray that blinded its victims, filling their nostrils with a reptilian odor of the jungle?

Only one man in the Boulder Lake Park area could hope to solve the mystery of the “Aliens” who had come to call on earth …

The strange visitors had landed. Why had they come, and what unknown terror would they bring upon our world?

The radio and television stations of the world carried the short, terrifying statement: The visitors were telepaths. These children from another time, another planet, were about to read human minds. They were utterly invincible.

And they were infinitely dreaded…

In the Pentagon and the Kremlin, leaders were grim with the awareness that all military secrets would be exposed…The overlords of the underworld realized the children could smash their most profitable rackets…And even ordinary citizens shuddered at the prospect of their shabby sins being found out.

So four small children came to be hated by the entire world.

A whole civilization wanted them dead.

Be glad you’re human . . .

Not that it wouldn’t be fun to be one of Richard Wilson’s visitors from outer space. But the trouble is, no matter how mentally superior, or how gorgeous, or how horrible – you’d never win . . . not against the wacky, witless, illogical, neurotic, inebriated and (happily) fallible denizens of Earth.

A collection of ten short science fiction stories by Richard Wilson, containing:

Those Idiots from Earth (1957)
The Inhabited (1953)
The Hoaxters (1952)
Lonely Road (1956)
Love (1952)
Honor (1956)
88 Beats 266 (1957) (a.k.a. “Succes Story”)
Don’t Fence Me In (1956)
Press Conference (1953) (a.k.a. “Visitor from the Void”)
It’s Cold Outside (1956)

An imaginative satire, telling of a benign Martian explorer comes to Earth to observe humanity-and is amazed to discover how Hollywood films and popular literature have engendered an irrational xenophobia and hatred of alien visitors. Befriended by a writer and his wife, the Martian is forced to remain incognito…

News from Nowhere describes the encounter between a visitor from the nineteenth century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these ‘Chapters from a Utopian Romance’ recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s own country house in Oxfordshire.

‘A really first-rate detective story’ T. S. Eliot

When twin brothers Roger and Neville Shandon are murdered by poisoned darts in Whistlefield’s famous hedge maze, Sir Clinton Driffield arrives to restore order. He finds two terrified witnesses – visitors to the estate – and clues aplenty in this brilliantly conceived and meticulously realized country-house mystery.

Are the Old Martians really a lost race – just withered mummies lying in dark caves? Or are they still alive – somewhere on the red planet?

Sally and Jim must find out. They must help their father discover if the Old Martians exist. His life work as a scientist is at stake!

But it’s not easy. They are only visitors to the Mars colony in this year 2017. And no one really wants them there.

Dive into adventure in the last unknown territory on Earth – the sea. Join Robby Hoenig and a cast of characters as unusual as any ever met on a distant planet…

In the first Robby Hoenig adventure, Secret Under the Sea, an aquatic visitor from another world is threatened by a criminal gang…

Gordon R. Dickson’s Robby Hoenig adventures are timeless young adult stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island.

A multinational expedition has landed on the planet Onogoro, a cold and dour world circling one star of a binary pair. Their objective is to investigate a strange alien race, known to the human visitors as the Kybers. These aliens, dwelling in a great network of ruined palaces, are partly biological creatures and partly machines, with the ability to switch themselves off at will. Expedition scientists discover that the Kyber’s sun is soon to blaze up in a nova, yet the Kybers are not alarmed.

The ingredients were quite simple: one middle-aged tycoon with a lovely young wife; one oh-so-apologetic visitor to the tycoon’s office; one devoted secretary, graduate of a correspondence course of How to Be a Detective.

But when these ingredients were combined and brought to the boil with the addition of one inflammable blonde – the result was murder.

And when Perry Mason was called in to clean up the kitchen, he found that too many cooks almost spoiled the broth.

Bill Hastings was one in a million. He was the winner of a planet-wide contest, and the prize was a chance to spend a year working at the 1992 World’s Fair. For the young xenobiology student, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Fifty thousand miles above the Earth, a gigantic satellite moved in its elegant orbit. It would be Bill’s home for a year, and host to hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 1992 World’s Fair was to be an orbital extravaganza, and Bill Hastings thought that his dreams had come true. He had a lot to learn.

Zabul was no ordinary world. It was a private religious sanctuary – location secret, visitors unwelcome. It was a world fanatically dedicated to one belief and to one goal. The belief that mankind originated on a single world . . . the goal was to find it.

To find Earth was a goal that Earl Dumarest shared. But how much did he really have in common with the zealot Terridae, who slept in caskets decorated with the zodiacs and dreamed of soaring towers of crystal and floating cities? And what were their despotic Guardians really after?





(First published 1981)

When a distinguished astrophysicist is presented with evidence of a new artefact approaching the solar system, his initial reaction is that the figures must be wrong. But they are not.

The mysterious object is not only real, it is heading towards us at an incredible velocity.

Then the data indicates that the visitor is a black hole. A black hole that can change direction. A black hole that is sending us a message…
I DESIRE CONVERSE
Eater is a fast-paced thriller from an author who is both a great storyteller and a highly respected scientist. It is a combination that makes for classic SF.

One of the tales of Jim Eckert, the young mathematician who travels to a parallel medieval world only to be transformed into a large but none too bright dragon named Gorbash. Now the Dragon Knight must confront the three disasters that lie in wait for any visitor to the English Middle ages: war, plague and Plantagenets

The Dragon Knight, faces three new challenges – a plague caused by an invasion of shape-changing goblins, the arrival of the quarrelsome and ambitious Plantagenet dynasty, and a full-scale human-versus-goblin war.

With the Entente Cordiale still in its infancy, the Sûreté had assigned Inspector Gautier to keep a protective eye on English visitors to Paris for the racing at Longchamps. But it was not the English who engaged Gautier’s attention, but an Irish surgeon – Michael Breen.

Breen, fêted by the ladies of Paris, is accused of a trivial assault – and almost at once Princess Hélène’s daughter goes missing and a shop assistant at Au Bon Marché is found dead just as Breen flees the country. Inspector Gautier is hot on his heels to Dublin, whilst a third murder back in Paris complicates the affair for all involved.

When Uncle Felix dies of a suspected overdose of digitalis, his niece Alison accepts the offer of a remote mountain lodge for the summer to get away from the tragedy.

But there are strange noises in the night and sinister visitors – and she discovers that the previous tenant was driven insane. What also transpires is that Uncle Felix had devised what he claimed to be an unbreakable cypher. The Pentagon is interested in this claim, and Alison has a fragment of a clue found beside her uncle’s bed. In the mountains she wrestles with the puzzle. But solving it will put her life in grave danger …

‘The Lying voices’ were the clocks that filled the room where Arnold Thaine was shot dead. They ticked in a hundred different rhythms but every single one was wrong. So the fact that a bullet had stopped one of them gave no clue to the time of his murder . . .

On the day of Thaine’s death, Justin Emery was visiting his old friend Grace DeLong, who had been to visit Thaine that morning. But who was the woman in the brown mackintosh who had entered Thaine’s study? Who were the other two visitors? And was anything to be learned from the broken clock?